Monthly Archives: March 2013
Passing Through
You don’t have to be from another planet to be an alien.
I used to find it very odd that unwelcome visitors from other countries were called aliens. Since I read so much sci-fi as a kid, I would get the two kinds mixed up. When I heard a news blub that mentioned aliens crossing the border, I would picture in my mind hordes of little green men invading from outer space. Ridiculously, since I most often heard about ‘wetbacks’, I usually embellished my inner news clip with amphibious frog-like Kermit aliens. This left me somewhat confused as to what the panic was all about as a herd of muppets couldn’t be all that dangerous.
Clearly, I was not properly indoctrinated into the local phobia regarding the most recent immigration wave. In the world of right wing politics and culture war hysteria that I grew up in, there were rigidly defined camps. You were either right or left (wrong) or rarely center (wimp). Given the available options, I wasn’t even on the map. If anything, I was vertical. All I wanted was out.
Perhaps if I could travel to the stars like the characters in my books, I could find the people like me. Over the years, I avidly followed the development and launch of the shuttle. I was sure that by the time I was an adult, star travel would be as common as flying across the country. Then came the Challenger disaster and years of cautious rebuilding. I watched and I waited, but it seemed that I would never find my way home.
Then one day, in my own backyard, I looked up and saw something that seemed impossible. A strange craft in the sky, flying above my house. It had a flat triangular tip in the front, a long narrow fuselage, and ended in narrow wings where the tail should be, but they bent up vertically in the middle. It moved like a plane, but it did not look like any plane I had ever seen on TV. Were the aliens finally here? I ran and grabbed my Kodak 110 and took as many grainy, low res photos as I could. I was ready for first contact!
Alas, this was not an alien craft, but instead an experimental plane designed by Burt Rutan. When years later, I heard that his team was competing for the X-prize for the first private craft to reach space, I was ecstatic. I followed his progress to victory in Space Ship One. Thanks to him and many other pioneers who have helped the private space race to finally begin, we are a few steps closer to reaching the stars. For some, it will be the final frontier. For others like me, it may be at last a place to belong.
Just Another Day
At a doctor’s appointment this morning in a new office, I waited for a nurse to call me back. Three different nurses arrived one by one, looked at their papers and called a name. I ignored them and waited. Another nurse emerged and I started to stand up. I caught myself and sat back down so that I would not draw attention. She scanned the papers and called my name. I stood and followed her to the exam room.
Later as I went to pick up one of my kids from a lesson, I walked in the door about 3 minutes late and knew immediately that my child was not in the building. Yet, I did not feel any sense of danger. I walked through looking and asking the leaders. Everyone had seen my son leave by the front door a few minutes before and no one had seen him since. Becoming frantic, I went back out and looked all up and down the front walkway. No sign of him. Yet, I felt strongly that he was nearby, but it made no sense. Why would he hide? Where could he hide,? I could see a long way in both directions. Not to mention it was a cold night and his jacket and shoes were inside. I had the strongest need to step outside and call for him, even though it seems impossible that he would be near. So, I called him and up he popped from a small corner near the stairs where he had decided to hide. After the required lecture and hugs, I asked why he had gone there. He wanted to wait where he could see me drive up, but I had driven in the back way.
A busy house often results in a dirty carpet, so I have a small steam cleaner for small messes. I cleaned up yet another routine mess and then started to put the equipment away as I usually do. But in this case, I had the strong thought that I would need it again very soon. So, I did not bother to wrap the cord and put it in the closet. I then gathered my drink and stuff to go join the kids.
This evening, playing with the kids, I started to set my glass of wine down on the carpet. I immediately got the “uh-oh” feeling. Sighing, I picked up the glass and moved it to an out of the way spot between a big toy and a door. Once again, I argued with the feeling that it could not possibly tip over back there. A few minutes later I moved across the room to pick up the ball we were playing with. As I turned, I saw it. My youngest holding the empty glass and saying, “Empty”. Yep, time to go get the steam cleaner.
The situations today were very clear and easy to spot. I usually get at least one a day. But for every strong feeling that is so clearly on target, there are a handful of near misses. I used to just ignore the near misses. But as I have become a little more clear on spotting the warnings, I can sometimes feel a faint shadow of what might have happened. Usually those are the ones where I would have smacked my shin or hurt myself in some other clumsy way. I can almost feel the pain I narrowly avoided. I realized that some will simply call that imagination. But I am clear on the difference. Not only is the echo more concrete than imagination, but I don’t experience the same faint almost pain when I avoid a normal obvious visual hazard. Still to anyone who has not dealt with it personally, it would be impossible to prove that I had prevented an accident. It seems to me, that the better I get at listening to the warnings and correctly adjusting my actions, the less I can demonstrate the validity of my extra sense.
The result of this constant double checking of every feeling and impulse is mentally exhausting. I would love to be able to just rest my brain and not have to think about the what ifs and extra layers. But I am terrified that if I drop my guard for one minute and stop paying attention, I will miss the critical warning that would save my kids. No matter how drained and stressed I am from all of this mental effort, I will do my best to stay on guard.
Out of the mouth of babes
I have struggled so much in my life with relating to others that I am very careful to give my children a conventional upbringing. Even though I am convinced that life is far stranger than most believe, I do not want to let my children become alienated from the culture they live in. I do not discuss the stranger aspects of my life with them yet, but I do tell them that not everyone believes the same thing. I want to let them find their own way as much as possible.
My son is in pre-school and loves to pretend, but he sees pretending as part of playing a game. Most of the time he works very hard at communicating in a concrete and serious way. Like me he is an Aspie and is dangerously honest. He finds any kind of misleading behavior or inaccuracy as totally unacceptable.
Tonight on the way home, we were talking about his best friend at school. Out of no where, he tells me that this boy is his favorite friend. He knew as soon as he saw him that they would love each other and be best friends. He went on to explain that when he first saw this boy at pre-school, a rainbow of light came out of the boy. He claims they both saw it. I asked him to describe the light. He said it was straight up out of the top of the kid’s head. It split into the rainbow colors and went out to points and came back around. I asked him how he knew the other boy saw it on him. My son said that they did not talk about it, but he could tell by the way they looked at each other that they both saw it.
About a year before, in the car on the way to pre-school, my son told me that he could see the ghosts under the road. Now, we do not let him watch scary/horror shows so his exposure to ghosts is strictly through cartoons. He also knows that when people die they are buried in the ‘sad place’, otherwise known as a cemetery. I can’t think of a reason for him to think there were ghosts under the road. He seemed convinced that they were there and they were real. This is the only time I know of where he as spoken about seeing ghosts.
Since he and I are so much alike, I can usually read him very well. Yet, there are times when it seems I am tuned in to him on a deeper level. Oddly, I don’t feel the same level of automatic understanding with my toddler daughter, so it must be something other than just that he is my child. He recently told me very seriously that it was rude of me to say what he was about to say, because it was the same as interrupting him. I told him, I was sorry that I had not meant to do it. Since I so often seem to tune in to the people I am close to, I could see how this would be frustrating if I regularly jump the gun in conversation. I just wish I could tell when I am doing it.
Lately he has started telling me he can smell things from far away. By far away, I mean from the next room or another building. I am not quite sure what to make of that one as it does not sound like anything I have heard before.
When he was about three, he told me how he died when he was with his other mom and dad from before. He said he was on a train with this other family and their dog. Then a bad man came on the train and started shooting people. He said his dog tried to pull him off the train to get away from the person who hurt him. But he said it was too late because he kept bleeding and he died. Hearing about this other family and tragic end did make me sad, but he did not seem very upset about it.
Parenting is hard enough when you realize that every small mistake you make can lead to a lifetime of emotional baggage for your children. I am beyond baffled as to how I am supposed to be parenting when I am such an odd duck and dealing with an odd duckling. The only thing I know for sure is to keeping loving him and giving him support and room to grow. Maybe he won’t grow up feeling that he has to hide from the world.
Hindsight and regret
I think it was winter 2001, I was living in the northern suburbs of Chicago. My apartment complex had a long winding drive that passed a few small ornamental duck ponds that sat in between the buildings. At one point, the road curved around the edge of a pond with only about six feet or so between them. There was an iron fence separating the pond from the road.
One evening after an exhausting day at work, I was driving through my complex past one of the duck ponds and the road was covered in snow. All I could think about was getting home and warming up. Then out of nowhere, an instant strong thought overwhelmed my mind – with so much snow on the road, a car could go straight through the middle of the iron fence and be submerged in the adjacent pond. This thought was not an image or words, but a concrete finished conclusion – more like replaying a memory than a what-if speculation or daydream.
As soon as I thought it, I immediately discounted it as not realistic. This drive had curves, snow and speed bumps. No one goes fast enough on it to have a big accident like that. Although a car could certainly drift or slide off the road, I could not see how it would make it all the way into the pond from that spot. It would have to do a very strange maneuver to go from the outer edge of the curve – which at that point is headed away from the pond – then make a 90 degree turn and hit the fence straight on. That path would be exactly perpendicular from the direction it had been traveling. Based on my limited experience, that was not how cars skidded in snow. Besides, the plowed snow created little berms on each side of the road, which would probably slow down or stop a car. Then I thought that the iron fence would further slow down or stop any car that had managed to drift that far. The whole idea of such a dramatic accident in such an awkward spot seemed ridiculous and I told myself firmly that it just could not happen.
Assuming that my very tired brain had simply cooked up some silliness to make me pay attention to my driving, I was extra careful going the few hundred more yards to my place. After some rest, the next day I headed back out to work. There was still lots of snow, but everything was normal in the complex and I did not think any more about the strange thoughts from the previous night.
Another long day and another drive home, took me back to the apartment drive about the same time of day and with the same snowy conditions. As I carefully made my way along, I could see something was a little different up ahead. There was something yellow flapping in the wind on the fence, but I could not see it clearly from the angle I was travelling. Then as I rounded that last curve and looked to my right, my heart stopped and I started shaking all over.
There were two tire tracks in the snow leaving the road from the furthest out part of the curve. They were exactly perpendicular to the direction of travel. They continued right up to the fence, or what was left of it. Now there was a car sized portion of the fence missing. The tire tracks continued past the fence, through the frozen crust and into the pond. There was a car sized hole in the icy surface. The yellow flapping in the wind had been the police tape warning people away from the scene.
My teeth chattered, my mind stopped completely and I felt devastated. Why? What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know any of my neighbors. I had no way to know which of them I could have warned. I had not even believed the warning, so why would they have listened if I had spoken up. Yet, no matter how I tried to rationalized it, I felt responsible. I felt like I failed and that the consequences were my fault.
I could not handle it. I did not know what to do, so I did nothing. I did not tell anyone. I did not watch the news. I did not read the paper. I completely avoided learning the fate of the person who ended up in that frozen pond. To this day, I do not know the end of the story.
But, I have learned my lesson. Now I do pay attention. I no longer dismiss the odd thoughts that intrude on my days. I try very hard to catch even the small warnings that pop up multiple times a day. I just hope that the next time I get a life or death message, I will know what to do. I can’t imagine anything worse that knowing something awful will happen to my loved ones and not being able to stop it.
Visionary Explorer 